"Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind"
About this Quote
Shakespeare treats love less like a virtue than a beautiful cognitive glitch: it edits the evidence. "Love to faults is always blind" isn’t a Hallmark endorsement; it’s an observation about how desire rewrites judgment, turning red flags into charming quirks. The line’s steady repetition of "always" has the force of a verdict. Love doesn’t occasionally mislead; it reliably does, and it does so with a kind of cheerful momentum, "to joy inclined", as if the emotion has its own agenda: keep the feeling intact, whatever the facts say.
Then the imagery goes feral. "Lawless, winged, and unconfined" lifts love out of the domestic sphere and into the realm of appetite, speed, and risk. Wings suggest both freedom and flightiness; what can fly can also flee. "Lawless" signals not romance’s innocence but its immunity to social rules, contracts, and consequences, a recurring Shakespearean preoccupation in plays where passion outruns propriety and chaos follows (think illicit marriages, mistaken identities, bed tricks, feuds turned combustible by attraction). Love breaks order not because it’s evil, but because it refuses to be governed.
The final claim, "breaks all chains from every mind", is the most double-edged: liberation and delusion share a spine. Love can unshackle people from fear, class anxiety, and stale self-concepts, but it can just as easily snap the chain that keeps reason tethered to reality. Shakespeare’s intent is to praise love’s ecstatic freedom while quietly warning that its sweetest feature is also its most destabilizing power.
Then the imagery goes feral. "Lawless, winged, and unconfined" lifts love out of the domestic sphere and into the realm of appetite, speed, and risk. Wings suggest both freedom and flightiness; what can fly can also flee. "Lawless" signals not romance’s innocence but its immunity to social rules, contracts, and consequences, a recurring Shakespearean preoccupation in plays where passion outruns propriety and chaos follows (think illicit marriages, mistaken identities, bed tricks, feuds turned combustible by attraction). Love breaks order not because it’s evil, but because it refuses to be governed.
The final claim, "breaks all chains from every mind", is the most double-edged: liberation and delusion share a spine. Love can unshackle people from fear, class anxiety, and stale self-concepts, but it can just as easily snap the chain that keeps reason tethered to reality. Shakespeare’s intent is to praise love’s ecstatic freedom while quietly warning that its sweetest feature is also its most destabilizing power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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